Embodiments of the present disclosure relate generally to optical spectroscopy, and more particularly to a system and a method for classifying tissue using optical spectroscopy.
In many fields of medicine, tissue classification is widely used to aid diagnosis in a patient. For example, when a patient presents with a suspicious deep tissue lesion, such as those identified during a diagnostic CT scan, the typical workup includes tissue classification to assist in diagnosis and stratify patients for further testing.
Among the existing techniques, core needle biopsy (CNB) is increasingly used as a minimally invasive method to acquire a representative sample of a deep tissue lesion. Typically in CNB, needle intervention is used for taking tissue biopsies and submitting it to pathology to determine a diagnosis. Compared to surgical or excisional biopsy, CNB procedure is less invasive, less expensive, faster, minimizes deformity, leaves little or no scarring and requires a shorter time for recovery. Also, CNB may obviate the need for surgery in a patient with benign lesions and also reduce the number of surgical procedures performed in the patient.
In general, the CNB is a common procedure used to obtain a biopsy specimen that includes a physical sample of a tissue site. Further, the biopsy specimen may be analyzed in a pathology laboratory using histopathological techniques to determine whether the tissue sample is cancerous. However, one of the problems in CNB is that approximately 15-20% of biopsy specimens/samples are non-diagnostic, which yields in too little tissue for a definitive diagnosis. As a result, in some cases, the CNB procedure may be repeated to obtain a viable amount of biopsy specimen/sample from the patient, which may create further complications to the patient. For example, piercing the needle repeatedly into lungs to obtain the biopsy specimen may result in a collapsed lung.
Moreover, the amount of diagnostic tissue in the biopsy specimen may limit the number and types of tests available to the pathologist several days following the biopsy procedure, potentially resulting in a delayed diagnosis and increased risk to the patient. Since the advent of new molecular pathology tests requires a larger amount of viable cancer tissue than conventional histopathology, this problem is likely to increase. Thus, there is a need for an improved method and system for quantifying the amount of diagnostic tissue within the excised biopsy specimen.